Mr. Jack Fleming stopped suddenly before a lifeless and decaying redwood-tree with an expression of disgust and impatience. It was the very tree he had passed only an hour before, and he now knew he had been describing that mysterious and hopeless circle familiar enough to those lost in the woods.

There was no mistaking the tree, with its one broken branch which depended at an angle like the arm of a semaphore; nor did it relieve his mind to reflect that his mishap was partly due to his own foolish abstraction. He was returning to camp from a neighboring mining town, and while indulging in the usual day-dreams of a youthful prospector, had deviated from his path in attempting to make a short cut through the forest. He had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced boughs above him, which suffused though the long columnar vault only a vague, melancholy twilight. He had evidently penetrated some unknown seclusion, absolutely primeval and untrodden. The thick layers of decaying bark and the desiccated dust of ages deadened his footfall and invested the gloom with a profound silence.

As he stood for a moment or two, irresolute, his ear, by this time attuned to the stillness, caught the faint but distinct lap and trickle of water. He was hot and thirsty, and turned instinctively in that direction. A very few paces brought him to a fallen tree; at the foot of its upturned roots gurgled the spring whose upwelling stream had slowly but persistently loosened their hold on the soil, and worked their ruin. A pool of cool and clear water, formed by the disruption of the soil, overflowed, and after a few yards sank again in the sodden floor.

As he drank and bathed his head and hands in this sylvan basin, he noticed the white glitter of a quartz ledge in its depths, and was considerably surprised and relieved to find, hard by, an actual outcrop of that rock through the thick carpet of bark and dust. This betokened that he was near the edge of the forest or some rocky opening. He fancied that the light grew clearer beyond, and the presence of a few fronds of ferns confirmed him in the belief that he was approaching a different belt of vegetation. Presently he saw the vertical beams of the sun again piercing the opening in the distance. With this prospect of speedy deliverance from the forest at last secure, he did not hurry forward, but on the contrary coolly retraced his footsteps to the spring again. The fact was that the instincts and hopes of the prospector were strongly dominant in him, and having noticed the quartz ledge and the contiguous outcrop, he determined to examine them more closely. He had still time to find his way home, and it might not be so easy to penetrate the wilderness again. Unfortunately, he had neither pick, pan, nor shovel with him, but a very cursory displacement of the soil around the spring and at the outcrop with his hands showed him the usual red soil and decomposed quartz which constituted an “indication.” Yet none knew better than himself how disappointing and illusive its results often were, and he regretted that he had not a pan to enable him to test the soil by washing it at the spring. If there were only a miner's cabin handy, he could easily borrow what he wanted. It was just the usual luck,—“the things a man sees when he hasn't his gun with him!”

He turned impatiently away again in the direction of the opening. When he reached it, he found himself on a rocky hillside sloping toward a small green valley. A light smoke curled above a clump of willows; it was from the chimney of a low dwelling, but a second glance told him that it was no miner's cabin. There was a larger clearing around the house, and some rude attempt at cultivation in a roughly fenced area. Nevertheless, he determined to try his luck in borrowing a pick and pan there; at the worst he could inquire his way to the main road again.

A hurried scramble down the hill brought him to the dwelling,—a rambling addition of sheds to the usual log cabin. But he was surprised to find that its exterior, and indeed the palings of the fence around it, were covered with the stretched and drying skins of animals. The pelts of bear, panther, wolf, and fox were intermingled with squirrel and wildcat skins, and the displayed wings of eagle, hawk, and kingfisher. There was no trail leading to or from the cabin; it seemed to have been lost in this opening of the encompassing woods and left alone and solitary.

The barking of a couple of tethered hounds at last brought a figure to the door of the nearest lean-to shed. It seemed to be that of a young girl, but it was clad in garments so ridiculously large and disproportionate that it was difficult to tell her precise age. A calico dress was pinned up at the skirt, and tightly girt at the waist by an apron—so long that one corner had to be tucked in at the apron string diagonally, to keep the wearer from treading on it. An enormous sunbonnet of yellow nankeen completely concealed her head and face, but allowed two knotted and twisted brown tails of hair to escape under its frilled cape behind. She was evidently engaged in some culinary work, and still held a large tin basin or pan she had been cleaning clasped to her breast.

Fleming's eye glanced at it covetously, ignoring the figure behind it. But he was diplomatic.

“I have lost my way in the woods. Can you tell me in what direction the main road lies?”

She pointed a small red hand apparently in the direction he had come. “Straight over thar—across the hill.”

Fleming sighed. He had been making a circuit of the forest instead of going through it—and this open space containing the cabin was on a remote outskirt!

“How far is it to the road?” he asked.

“Jest a spell arter ye rise the hill, ef ye keep 'longside the woods. But it's a right smart chance beyond, ef ye go through it.”

This was quite plain to him. In the local dialect a “spell” was under a mile; “a right smart chance” might be three or four miles farther. Luckily the spring and outcrop were near the outskirts; he would pass near them again on his way. He looked longingly at the pan which she still held in her hands. “Would you mind lending me that pan for a little while?” he said half laughingly.

“Wot for?” demanded the girl quickly. Yet her tone was one of childish curiosity rather than suspicion. Fleming would have liked to avoid the question and the consequent exposure of his discovery which a direct answer implied. But he saw it was too late now.

“I want to wash a little dirt,” he said bluntly.

The girl turned her deep sunbonnet toward him. Somewhere in its depths he saw the flash of white teeth. “Go along with ye—ye're funnin'!” she said.

“I want to wash out some dirt in that pan—I'm prospecting for gold,” he said; “don't you understand?”

“Are ye a miner?”

“Well, yes—a sort of one,” he returned, with a laugh.

“Then ye'd better be scootin' out o' this mighty quick afore dad comes. He don't cotton to miners, and won't have 'em around. That's why he lives out here.”

“Well, I don't live out here,” responded the young man lightly. “I shouldn't be here if I hadn't lost my way, and in half an hour I'll be off again. So I'm not likely to bother him. But,” he added, as the girl still hesitated, “I'll leave a deposit for the pan, if you like.”

“Leave a which?”

“The money that the pan's worth,” said Fleming impatiently.

The huge sunbonnet stiffly swung around like the wind-sail of a ship and stared at the horizon. “I don't want no money. Ye kin git,” said the voice in its depths.

“Look here,” he said desperately, “I only wanted to prove to you that I'll bring your pan back safe. Now look! If you don't like to take money, I'll leave this ring with you until I come back. There!” He slipped a small specimen ring, made out of his first gold findings, from his little finger.

The sunbonnet slowly swung around again and stared at the ring. Then the little red right hand reached forward, took the ring, placed it on the forefinger of the left hand, with all the other fingers widely extended for the sunbonnet to view, and all the while the pan was still held against her side by the other hand. Fleming noticed that the hands, though tawny and not over clean, were almost childlike in size, and that the forefinger was much too small for the ring. He tried to fathom the depths of the sun-bonnet, but it was dented on one side, and he could discern only a single pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow.

“Well,” said Fleming, “is it a go?”

“Of course ye'll be comin' back for it again,” said the girl slowly.

There was so much of hopeless disappointment at that prospect in her voice that Fleming laughed outright. “I'm afraid I shall, for I value the ring very much,” he said.

The girl handed him the pan. “It's our bread pan,” she said.

It might have been anything, for it was by no means new; indeed, it was battered on one side and the bottom seemed to have been broken; but it would serve, and Fleming was anxious to be off. “Thank you,” he said briefly, and turned away. The hound barked again as he passed; he heard the girl say, “Shut your head, Tige!” and saw her turn back into the kitchen, still holding the ring before the sunbonnet.

When he reached the woods, he attacked the outcrop he had noticed, and detached with his hands and the aid of a sharp rock enough of the loose soil to fill the pan. This he took to the spring, and, lowering the pan in the pool, began to wash out its contents with the centrifugal movement of the experienced prospector. The saturated red soil overflowed the brim with that liquid ooze known as “slumgullion,” and turned the crystal pool to the color of blood until the soil was washed away. Then the smaller stones were carefully removed and examined, and then another washing of the now nearly empty pan showed the fine black sand covering the bottom. This was in turn as gently washed away.

Alas! the clean pan showed only one or two minute glistening yellow scales, like pinheads, adhering from their specific gravity to the bottom; gold, indeed, but merely enough to indicate “the color,” and common to ordinary prospecting in his own locality.

He tried another panful with the same result. He became aware that the pan was leaky, and that infinite care alone prevented the bottom from falling out during the washing. Still it was an experiment, and the result a failure.

Fleming was too old a prospector to take his disappointment seriously. Indeed, it was characteristic of that performance and that period that failure left neither hopelessness nor loss of faith behind it; the prospector had simply miscalculated the exact locality, and was equally as ready to try his luck again. But Fleming thought it high time to return to his own mining work in camp, and at once set off to return the pan to its girlish owner and recover his ring.

As he approached the cabin again, he heard the sound of singing. It was evidently the girl's voice, uplifted in what seemed to be a fragment of some negro camp-meeting hymn:—

The first two lines had a brisk movement, accented apparently by the clapping of hands or the beating of a tin pan, but the refrain, “Lord bress de Lamb,” was drawn out in a lugubrious chant of infinite tenuity.

Fleming paused at the cabin door. Before he could rap the voice rose again:—

At the end of this interminable refrain, drawn out in a youthful nasal contralto, Fleming knocked. The girl instantly appeared, holding the ring in her fingers. “I reckoned it was you,” she said, with an affected briskness, to conceal her evident dislike at parting with the trinket. “There it is!”

But Fleming was too astounded to speak. With the opening of the door the sunbonnet had fallen back like a buggy top, disclosing for the first time the head and shoulders of the wearer. She was not a child, but a smart young woman of seventeen or eighteen, and much of his embarrassment arose from the consciousness that he had no reason whatever for having believed her otherwise.

“I hope I didn't interrupt your singing,” he said awkwardly.

“It was only one o' mammy's camp-meetin' songs,” said the girl.

“Your mother? Is she in?” he asked, glancing past the girl into the kitchen.

“'Tain't mother—she's dead. Mammy's our old nurse. She's gone to Jimtown, and taken my duds to get some new ones fitted to me. These are some o' mother's.”

This accounted for her strange appearance; but Fleming noticed that the girl's manner had not the slightest consciousness of their unbecomingness, nor of the charms of face and figure they had marred.

She looked at him curiously. “Hev you got religion?”

“Well, no!” said Fleming, laughing; “I'm afraid not.”

“Dad hez—he's got it pow'ful.”

“Is that the reason he don't like miners?” asked Fleming.

“'Take not to yourself the mammon of unrighteousness,'” said the girl, with the confident air of repeating a lesson. “That's what the Book says.”

“But I read the Bible, too,” replied the young man.

“Dad says, 'The letter killeth'!” said the girl sententiously.

Fleming looked at the trophies nailed on the walls with a vague wonder if this peculiar Scriptural destructiveness had anything to do with his skill as a marksman. The girl followed his eye.

“Dad's a mighty hunter afore the Lord.”

“What does he do with these skins?”

“Trades 'em off for grub and fixin's. But he don't believe in trottin' round in the mud for gold.”

“Don't you suppose these animals would have preferred it if he had? Gold hunting takes nothing from anybody.”

The girl stared at him, and then, to his great surprise, laughed instead of being angry. It was a very fascinating laugh in her imperfectly nourished pale face, and her little teeth revealed the bluish milky whiteness of pips of young Indian corn.

“Wot yer lookin' at?” she asked frankly.

“You,” he replied, with equal frankness.

“It's them duds,” she said, looking down at her dress; “I reckon I ain't got the hang o' 'em.”

Yet there was not the slightest tone of embarrassment or even coquetry in her manner, as with both hands she tried to gather in the loose folds around her waist.

“Let me help you,” he said gravely.

She lifted up her arms with childlike simplicity and backed toward him as he stepped behind her, drew in the folds, and pinned them around what proved a very small waist indeed. Then he untied the apron, took it off, folded it in half, and retied its curtailed proportions around the waist. “It does feel a heap easier,” she said, with a little shiver of satisfaction, as she lifted her round cheek, and the tail of her blue eyes with their brown lashes, over her shoulder. It was a tempting moment—but Jack felt that the whole race of gold hunters was on trial just then, and was adamant! Perhaps he was a gentle fellow at heart, too.

“I could loop up that dress also, if I had more pins,” he remarked tentatively. Jack had sisters of his own.

The pins were forthcoming. In this operation—a kind of festooning—the girl's petticoat, a piece of common washed-out blue flannel, as pale as her eyes, but of the commonest material, became visible, but without fear or reproach to either.

“There, that looks more tidy,” said Jack, critically surveying his work and a little of the small ankles revealed. The girl also examined it carefully by its reflection on the surface of the saucepan. “Looks a little like a chiny girl, don't it?”

Jack would have resented this, thinking she meant a Chinese, until he saw her pointing to a cheap crockery ornament, representing a Dutch shepherdess, on the shelf. There was some resemblance.

“You beat mammy out o' sight!” she exclaimed gleefully. “It will jest set her clear crazy when she sees me.”

“Then you had better say you did it yourself,” said Fleming.

“Why?” asked the girl, suddenly opening her eyes on him with relentless frankness.

“You said your father didn't like miners, and he mightn't like your lending your pan to me.”

“I'm more afraid o' lyin' than o' dad,” she said with an elevation of moral sentiment that was, however, slightly weakened by the addition, “Mammy'll say anything I'll tell her to say.”

“Well, good-by,” said Fleming, extending his hand.

“Ye didn't tell me what luck ye had with the pan,” she said, delaying taking his hand.

Fleming shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, my usual luck,—nothing,” he returned, with a smile.

“Ye seem to keer more for gettin' yer old ring back than for any luck,” she continued. “I reckon you ain't much o' a miner.”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Ye didn't say wot yer name was, in case dad wants to know.”

“I don't think he will want to; but it's John Fleming.”

She took his hand. “You didn't tell me yours,” he said, holding the little red fingers, “in case I wanted to know.”

It pleased her to consider the rejoinder intensely witty. She showed all her little teeth, threw away his hand, and said:—

“G' long with ye, Mr. Fleming. It's Tinka”—

“Tinker?”

“Yes; short for Katinka,—Katinka Jallinger.”

“Good-by, Miss Jallinger.”

“Good-by. Dad's name is Henry Boone Jallinger, of Kentucky, ef ye was ever askin'.”

“Thank you.”

He turned away as she swiftly re-entered the house. As he walked away, he half expected to hear her voice uplifted again in the camp-meeting chant, but he was disappointed. When he reached the top of the hill he turned and looked back at the cabin.

She was apparently waiting for this, and waved him an adieu with the humble pan he had borrowed. It flashed a moment dazzlingly as it caught the declining sun, and then went out, even obliterating the little figure behind it.